Prize Problems

What do the big literary prizes really represent? Fellow Salt author and blogger Elizabeth Baines has been posting about rules in the Booker and the Guardian first book award that palpably discriminate against small publishers such as ours. I recommend you take a look. The scary thing is that, if my reaction and those of the other authors commenting on her Facebook profile and blog posts are anything to go by, many writers are unaware of the true state of play, so how much more must that be true of the reading public? I had no idea of this before I got published and prize/award rules became a live issue. Perhaps that was just naive, but how many of us really stop to think about these matters until we have to?